Art e-Facts 78: Mark Leckey

Mark Leckey was this evening announced as the winner of the 2008 Turner Prize winner by Australian Rock Star NIck Cave at a ceremony at Tate Britain.

One of the most controversial Turner Prize exhibitions for many years the exhibition has been vilified by visitors and critics alike. Leckey was robust in his response to the critics however dismissing the British critical establishment as having an unhealthy interest in ‘mid-brow’ art.

Art e-Facts 77: Langlands & Bell

ContemoporaryArtETC.com students at Talbot Rice Gallery.

The House of Osoma bin Laden: 2004

Zardad’s Dog

ContemoporaryArtETC.com students at Talbot Rice Gallery.

In 2002 they were commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to research the War in Afganistan. As a result of their the pair produced a trilogy of works including The House of Osama bin Laden, an interactive computer animation of the house occupied by Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s. The work, which utalised state of the art gaming technology of the day allows the viewer to move through digital landscape seeking that which is no longer present.

In 2004 the work won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts award (BAFTA) for Interactive Art Installation. The work also featured in their Turner Prize nominated show at Tate Britain in the same year. A second work in the trilogy Zardads Dog which documented the trail of Abdullah Shah, nicknamed Zardad’s Dog because of his penchant for biting his victims before murdering them, was withdrawn from exhibition amid fears that it may be held in contempt of court during the then trial of Afghan warlord Faryadi Sarwar Zardad.

Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh as part of the Langlands & Bell Films & Animations 1978 – 2008 exhibition until December 13th. Other notable works in the exhibition include 2008’s ‘Departure‘ a ‘Guerilla Website’ linked to wallpaper.com and ‘Kitchen’ their first film collaboration from 1978. 

The staff and students of ContemporaryArtETC.com would like to thank Zoë Fothergill and the Talbot Rice Gallery for the excellent talk and tour we received at the exhibition.

www.langlandsandbell.com

www.wallpaper.com/art/langlands–bell-digital-exclusive/2369

www.trg.ed.ac.uk/

Art e-Facts 76:

Killer to sleep with fishes in controversial art installation:

A convicted murderer is to be turned into a work of art should his final appeal against his sentence fail. Gene Hathorn (above), an inmate on death row convicted in 1985 of murdering his father, step-mother, and step-brother will be frozen, turned into fish food for hundreds of goldfish. Visitors to the exhibit will be asked to feed the occupants of a giant aquarium placed in a gallery . Copenhagen based artist Marco Everistti is continuing negotiations with American lawyers and an undisclosed company willing to help turn Hathorns remains into fish food.

Everistti, who is helping to fund Hathorn’s final appeal through the sale of drawings; made by the killer in jail; aims to raise awareness of state sanctioned execution in Western civilisation. The artists previous works have presented the audience with equally difficult questions and dilemas relating to their participation in the works. In 2000 he exhibited food blenders filled with water and goldfish (above) and invited visitors to switch the blenders on and in 2007 he held a dinner party where guests were served meatballs made with fat removed from his own body during a liposuction procedure.

www.evaristti.com

source: The Art Newspaper: Clemens Bomsdorf

Art e-Facts 75

In 1966, John Latham borrowed a copy of Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture — a work held in the highest regard at the time — from the library of Saint Martin’s School of Art, where Latham was employed as a part-time lecturer. At a party Latham invited students to chew pages from the book, and then distilled the resulting pulp into a clear liquid. This process took several months, and Latham began to receive letters from the library demanding its return. Latham presented a vial of the fermented book-pulp to the library, but this was rejected and his teaching contract was not renewed. The vial and correspondence became an artwork of its own, displayed in a leather case; the piece is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Art e-Facts 74: Anthony d’Offay; Gift to the Nation

Anthony d’Offay (Right) with artist Ed Ruscha

A new modern art collection, to be known as ARTIST ROOMS, was announced today, created through one of the largest and most imaginative gifts of art ever made to museums in Britain. The gift has been made by Anthony d’Offay, with the assistance the Scottish and British Governments.

Anthony d’Offay will receive £26.5m for his donation of 725 works, 1 fifth of their estimated market value.

The paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures by 32 artists, including Bruce Nauman, Gilbert and George, Damien Hirst, Joseph Beuys, Jeff Koons and Ed Ruscha will travel across galleries and museums in Britain.

The collection will be owned and managed by the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate , who said the art would “transform the nation’s collections of contemporary art”.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Scottish Government have each donated £10m to the cost of buying the works, which would fill the space of one and a half floors of Tate Modern.

Every body here at Contemporary Art ETC…. are delighted and grateful to Anthony d’Offay, Tate and the National Galleries for such a significant investment in our contemporary cultural landscape.

“Listen. We weren’t thinking about the financial side at all. We weren’t thinking about the business side at all. We were thinking about young people and education. We were thinking about reaching out to young people. We were thinking about how you can put together great works of art which can move and change people.” Anthony d’Offay 27th February 2008

Art e-Facts 73

Over the past eight years Berlin based British artist Tino Sehgal has been
“rethinking the notion of a product as a transformation of actions not as a
transformation of materials.” and has become known for making art without actually making any objects.

Direct experience is an essential component in the work and his working
methods involve organizing and instructing people (adults; often posing as
museum guards; teenagers or children) to use their body and/or voice to
construct “situations” that can be observed and experienced.

Art e-Facts 72 (New Year Special)

On the 1st of January 2007 the Twin Cities based collaborative art partnership Tectonic Industries and their family undertook their “One Year Project” to prepare, cook, eat and evaluate a meal each day as dictated by the book “365: No Repeats A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners“ by American celebrity cook Rachael Ray.

Despite personal disliking for a variety of foodstuffs and in one case an allergy to eggs, they fully committed to the project and published a daily blog giving an illuminating insight into the experience and the many challenges they faced including moving house, the birth of a new baby, cross country trips to exhibition openings and 5 variations of macaroni cheese 5 nights in a row.

Our sincere congratulations and thanks (as beneficiaries of the last 12 meals) goes to Tectonic Industries who completed the last recipe yesterday with Hamburger and Onion Stuffed Bread followed by Christmas Pasta.

Rumours are that “Another One Year Project” launches today with “Mustard Pork Chops” by a certain Ms N Lawson.

For further information go to:

http://oneyearproject.com/

http://anotheroneyearproject.com/

http://www.tectonic-industries.com/

Art e-Facts 71 (Christmas Special)

Christmas has been a recurrent theme in the work of California based artist Paul McCarthy. Works including; “Santa with Butt Plug” and “Santa Chocolate Shop” have examined and skewered the American idolised vision of Santa Claus.

Since the late 1960s, McCarthy has pushed the boundaries of taboo through the media of performance art, sculpture, and video. In his early performance works, the artist used his own body as material, testing his physical limits amidst a mess of American condiments like mayonnaise and ketchup. His attack on the values of the American way of life and on a society manipulated by the media continued into the 80s, when he began to produce mechanical sculptures that gradually replaced his own presence in the gallery. In the 90s, his ever expansive installations continued to break taboos in a theatrically drastic way, further exploring issues of violence and pornography, masturbation, birth, and death.

In “Santa Chocolate Shop” first shown in the 1997 Whitney Biennial, McCarthy achieves the ultimate dismantling of sentimental notions of childhood innocence. The installation includes a lopsided plywood house and a life-size video projection of Santa “making chocolate” into the mouth of a prone little helper while men in crotch less animal suits scurry around the workshop.

No stranger to food in his art, McCarthy produced 10 inch chocolate figurines based on his sculpture, Santa With Butt Plug, a 24 metre high inflatable public sculpture. He transformed the Maccarone gallery in New York’s West Village into Peter Paul Chocolates, a fully functioning chocolate factory, turning out 1,000 ‘Santa With Tree And Bell’ chocolate figurines each day.

Art e-Facts 70

Art or Advert

Tim Noble and Sue Webster entered the London art scene in the mid-1990s, just as others of the so-called “Young British Artists” were attracting increasing attention.

The artists are united by their fascination with the mechanics of the media and advertising industries, and by the notion of the young British artist as celebrity. They employ a wide variety of visual styles, combining and confusing the spectacular and the mundane in a manner best described as consistently inconsistent.

Some of their most notable pieces are made from piles of rubbish collected from London streets. A light is projected against the pile, and the shadow on the wall creates an entirely different image, typically of the couple themselves: this is not at all apparent from looking directly at the sculpture itself.

The same technique is used in the current advertising campaign for the John Lewis department stores.

Art e-Facts 69

When Joan Eardley painted ‘Sleeping Nude’ in 1954 she was subjected to ‘Shock Horror’ headlines in the scottish tabloid press. One newspaper went so far as to print the artists home address inviting the public to make their feelings on the work known directly. The main result of the publication however was perhaps more disturbing, as several men turned up offering their services as models.

Born in Sussex in 1921, Eardley moved to Glasgow in 1940, studying at Glasgow School of Art. Her paintings of children playing in rundown Glasgow tenements, and her landscapes painted in and around the fishing village of Catterline on the north-east coast of Scotland, are among the most celebrated works in Scottish art. Her career was cut tragically short in 1963, when she died of cancer at the age of 42.

The National Gallery of Scotland is currently presenting one of the largest Eardley exhibitions ever held, and it is also the first major exhibition of her work in nearly twenty years.

http://www.nationalgalleries.org

FOR INFORMATION ON FINE ART COURSES IN EDINBURGH PLEASE CLICK HERE

Art e-Facts 68

Swiss artist Roman Signer’s “action sculptures” involve setting up, carrying out, and recording “experiments” or events that bear aesthetic results. Following carefully planned and strictly executed and documented procedures, the artist enacts and records such acts as explosions, collisions, and the projection of objects through space. Video works like Stiefel mit Rakete (Boot with Rocket) are integral to Signer’s performances, capturing the original setup of materials that self-destruct in the process of creating an emotionally and visually compelling event. Signer gives a humorous twist to the concept of cause and effect and to the traditional scientific method of experimentation and discovery, taking on the self-evidence of scientific logic as an artistic challenge.

Exhibitions of Signers work are currently running at:

Fruitmarket Gallery: Edinburgh. Until January 27th

Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Modern Art: Berlin Until January 27th

http://www.cmoa.org/international/html/art/signer.htm

Art e-Facts 67

Doris Salcedo Shibboleth Tate Modern Turbine Hall

There can be few more challenging spaces for an artist to be commissioned to produce work for than the Turbine Hall entrance of the Tate modern Gallery in London.
From Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment to Bruce Nauman’s Raw Materials and Carson Holler’s Test Site (the slides) success has been variable.
The Tates 8th commissioned artist was the Columbian sculptor Doris Salcedo

When Salcedo’s Shibboleth was unveiled it wasn’t the meaning of the work that seemed to trouble and baffle the public and critics alike, interpretations ranging from a comment on the art world, humanities consciousness and racism and the divided world but how the 548ft (167metres) crack in the solid concrete turbine hall was created. The crack starts with a very fine and small hairline fissure and gradually widens into a 3ft crevasse. Suggestions ranged from a fake painted optical illusion to an actual crack in the floor which had been worsened to create the work. In the end the Guardian newspaper decided to investigate and interviewed a construction worker who was working on another project at the Tate. I’ll leave the description to the builder, only identified as Mr E:

‘They dug a dirty great trench about a yard deep and a yard wide and then they brought in lorry load after lorry load of cement and poured it in, using 10ft sections of what looked liked carved polystyrene moulding to form the sides. Then a whole bunch of people lay on their stomachs for about a week and finished it off with brushes.
When it was pointed out to Mr E that the trench was about racism he replied, ‘Its about racism, can’t see it myself, but it was a pretty good trench’

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7033619.stm

Art e-Facts 66

“I want the manifestation of my ideas to be life-sized, not only regarding their scale, but also in terms of their relevance to their situation or medium. Then they’re more like the ideas behind something. Art is just a manifestation, a Trojan Horse, for ideas.”

Ceal Floyer.

Ceal Floyer born in Pakistan, raised in London now living and working Berlin, is the 2007 winner of the Pries der Nationalgalerie Fur Junge Kunst (Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art) awarded to

The other shortlisted Artists for the prize were Jeanne Faust, Damián Ortega and Tino Sehgal.

The jury’s decision reflects the diversity of artistic production in Germany, not only with regard to the different nationalities involved, but also in terms of the media and artistic strategies used.

The work of all four artists is currently on display in a joint exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin from 14 September to 4 November 2007.

http://www.preis2007.de

http://www.hamburgerbahnhof.de/cont/conte/

Art e-Facts 64

The Venice Biennale is one of the most important events in the art world calendar. Happening every 2 years, this year is the 52nd edition with Robert Storr an American curator, critic and artist acting as director and has been titled ‘Think with the Senses, Feel with the mind,’

The exhibition consists of 2 main parts the Giardini and the Arsenale. The Giardini consists of 30 pavilions each acting as representation for different nations and a large Exhibition Hall featuring a group show curated by the current director. The Arsenale houses the ‘Aperto’ exhibition also curated by the director, which operates as a more thematic space showing generally younger artists not represented by the pavilions in the Giardini.

Aside from the 2 main sites there are collateral events taking place all throughout Venice including pavilions for the countries not included within the Giardini.

This year the show runs on to the 21st of November and some of the highlights include Sophie Calle representing France with a project based on an email a boyfriend sent her to break up with her, Russia whose pavilion was filled with a dizzying array of high technology, and the Lithuanian pavilion which presented some nice calm minimalist work which provided some much needed relaxation after the sheer spectacle of the rest of the event.

Courtesy: B. Fallon

Art e-Facts 63

Conceptual artist Michael Asher (1943) took this process one step further and took minimalism to its logical conclusion by removing the object or image altogether, creating an art that forced the viewer to analyze what wasn’t there, rather than what was. Presumably this is a difficult concept to accept when considering that an empty space couldn’t possibly hold any meaning. Or could it?

For example, when he temporarily removed a dividing wall in a Los Angeles gallery in 1973, he successfully achieved the task of creating more for the viewer to see and contemplate. Before the exhibit opened, when in place, the wall functioned to separate the office space from the exhibition space and prohibit visitors from observing the day-to-day operations of the gallery. Once removed for the exhibit, desks and chairs, books and papers, telephones, file cabinets and other administrative items located in the rear of the gallery were on display occupying the once seemingly empty space. By removing the wall, the gallery itself became the artwork.

This exhibit, or de-installation, related to the ideas behind many conceptual works of the time, questioned the increasingly materialistic nature of artworks and gallery system, which included the economic, historical, and institutional factors.

Throughout his career Michael Asher has continued to use art galleries and institutions such as museums as his medium. For each exhibition he chooses to alter the space by removing various elements, rearranging them, or otherwise changing their location. For a 1979 exhibit held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, he removed large panels from the building’s facade and hung them on an interior wall within the museum. Although the subtle nature of the work made it difficult to immediately detect, the museum itself became the work.

http://arted.osu.edu/160/12_Asher.php

FOR INFORMATION ON FINE ART COURSES IN EDINBURGH PLEASE CLICK HERE

Art e-Facts 62

In the mid-seventies American Artist Leon Golub destroyed nearly every work he produced nearly abandoned painting. In the late seventies, however, he produced more than a hundred portraits of public figures, among them political leaders, dictators, and religious figures. Leon Golub: Paintings, 1950-2000 includes several portraits of Nelson Rockefeller and Ho Chi Minh, along with images of Fidel Castro, Francisco Franco, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger.

In the 1980s Golub turned his attention to terrorism in a variety of forms, from the subversive operations of governments to urban street violence. Killing fields, torture chambers, bars, and brothels became inspiration and subject for work that dealt with such themes as violent aggression, racial inequality, gender ambiguity, oppression, and exclusion. Among the work produced in this period are the series Mercenaries, Interrogation, Riot, and Horsing Around.

Art e-Facts 61

The International Klein Blue (IKB) is a deep blue hue first mixed by the French artist Yves Klein.

International Klein Blue was developed by French artist Yves Klein as part of his search for colors which best represented the concepts he wished to convey as an artist. Although Klein had worked with blue extensively in his earlier career, it was not until 1958 that he used it as the central component of a piece (the color effectively becoming the art). Klein embarked on a series of monochromatic works using IKB as the central theme. These included performance art where Klein painted models’ naked bodies and had them walk, roll and sprawl upon blank canvases as well as more conventional single-color canvases.

The secret of IKB’s remarkable visual impact comes from its heavy reliance on Ultramarine, as well as Klein’s often thick and textured application of paint to canvas.

IKB was developed by Klein and chemists to have the same color brightness and intensity as dry pigments, which it achieves by suspending dry pigment in a clear synthetic resin. This new medium was patented by Klein.

International Klein Blue is outside the gamut of computer displays, and can therefore not be accurately portrayed on this page.

FOR INFORMATION ON FINE ART COURSES IN EDINBURGH PLEASE CLICK HERE

Art e-Facts 60

MONUMENTA is a new contemporary art event providing leading international artists with the opportunity to engage with the great steel-and-glass nave of Paris’s Grand Palais, through the creation of a series of totally new installations. Reflecting the extraordinary dynamism of the international contemporary art scene, MONUMENTA is a unique opportunity to discover the work of some of today’s greatest living artists.

Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra and Christian Boltanski will create the first three installations in the MONUMENTA series. Renowned international artist Anselm Kiefer, presented the first work in the series – a spectacular, entirely new installation – from May 30, 2007. MONUMENTA 2008 will feature the American sculptor Richard Serra, followed by one of France’s leading artists, Christian Boltanski, in 2009.

Recently renovated, the Grand Palais is a unique space, in Paris and the world. Created for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, the Grand Palais is an architectural treasure on a vast, monumental scale. Its immense glass roof soars to a height of 60 meters beneath the central dome, and the nave extends for over 200 meters at ground level, covering a surface of some 13,500 square meters in a single span. This historic venue is the setting for an array of leading cultural events.

www.monumenta.com

Art e-Facts 59

Gordon Matta-Clark was born in New York on June 22, 1943, to artists Roberto Matta and Anna Clark. Teeny Duchamp, Marcel’s wife, was Matta-Clark’s godmother. Matta-Clark’s childhood was spent in New York, Paris, and Chile. He studied architecture at Cornell University in 1963-68.

In 1969, Matta-Clark moved back to New York. Over the following two years, he explored the metamorphic possibilities of cooking, beginning by frying Polaroid photographs in oil with gold leaf. In the early 1970s, he helped organize 112 Greene Street, an exhibition space showing new art. He also collaborated on Food, a combined restaurant and performance piece; made Garbage Wall, a prototype shelter for the homeless; and was active in building SoHo as an artists’ community. He addressed popular culture in the 1973 Photoglyphs, hand-colored black-and-white photographs depicting New York’s burgeoning graffiti.

During the 1970s, Matta-Clark made the works for which he is best known: his “anarchitecture.” These were temporary works created by sawing and carving sections out of buildings, most of which were scheduled to be destroyed. He documented these projects in photography and film. Although he made interventions into a former iron foundry in Genoa, Italy, in 1973, his first large-scale project has been defined as Splitting (1974). To create this work, Matta-Clark sawed two parallel slices through a nondescript wood-frame house in Englewood, New Jersey, and removed the material between the two cuts. In addition, he cut out the corners of the house’s roof, which were subsequently shown at John Gibson Gallery in New York. He made similar gestures in some of his photographs, cutting the actual negatives rather than manipulating individual prints.

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_105A.html

FOR INFORMATION ON FINE ART COURSES IN EDINBURGH PLEASE CLICK HERE

Art e-Facts 58

After his death on the 22nd of February 1987 Andy Warhol’s estate was decided by the courts to be worth, conservatively, over half a billion dollars: $509,979,278.00. The Warhol Foundation contested this figure in court and it was eventually reduced to $228 million. It was to the Foundation’s advantage to have a lower evaluation of Warhol’s paintings because it meant they would have to pay less in legal fees to the attorney for the estate who was on a percentage of 2.5% of the value of the estate. Also, The Foundation was legally obligated to award 5 percent of its assets for charitable grants and a lower valuation meant that they would have to pay out less money.

In order to back up their legal challenge for a lesser evaluation, the Foundation argued in court that Warhol was not as great an artist as some independent experts believed him to be. Art dealer Andre Emmerich testified for the Foundation that Warhol’s work was likely to fade into obscurity because the subjects of his paintings (Marilyn Monroe, Elvis etc…) would eventually be forgotten. The Foundation paid Emmerich $4,000 a day to testify plus $3,500 for preparatory work.